Senate Slaps Bush While He's Abroad

The U.S. Senate, under the wonderful (not) leadership of Bill Frist, dealt President Bush a body blow today when they voted in a resolution that essentially demanded that he set a timetable for troop withdrawal commencing some time in 2006. And this while the president was traveling in Asia.

Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, in an interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show this afternoon, pointed out an aspect to this I had not considered:

When you practice that kind of legislation, you're going to get poor results. You can't have a committee run a war, the war...we have to win this war. This is a real war, and what they did is damage the American people today, because together, we can win this war. If we divide ourselves, we'll lose the war, and most Americans don't understand that if we lose this war, it's not like walking home from Vietnam with our head down. It is we lose our way of life. And they will pick off the Europeans, one at a time, we will not have allies, we will not have the trade, the standard of living that we have today, and we will be vulnerable evermore.

By demanding regular reports (which they had already been getting, and in greater frequency than they requested in this resolution) and a timetable for withdrawal, the Senate is handing Iraqi terrorists exactly what they want. Now the terrorists will be encouraged to sit back and wait it out, and those Iraqis who might be opposing the terrorists there will be discouraged from helping our military track them down because they fear our withdrawal and their own death as a result. This thing is a disaster, politically.

I've already written to the Senate Majority leader, Bill Frist, and to John Warner, the sponsor of the bill, and to the Majority Whip, Mitch McConnell. Let's see whether they backtrack at all, tomorrow (I'm not holding my breath). At a minimum, the president should be on the phone to these guys, if not outright denouncing the action in a speech, even before he comes back to the U.S.